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How the BBC enforces the woke agenda

We’ve seen from our previous post on the BBC and its woke agenda the extent to which it will go to ensure that its output is consistently left wing, with opposing viewpoints either misrepresented or not represented at all.

Woke in, woke out

But there are other ways in which the BBC’s inbuilt left wing bias manifests itself. Before programmes can be broadcast they have to be planned and organised, producers and presenters found, and interviewees or panelists and, where appropriate, audience members, invited.

And it is here, as much as in the content of its programmes, that the BBC ensures that it has a built in bias in favour of all things woke. A glimpse of this was given us early this year, when an internal BBC recruitment policy document came to light. This instructed all managers and recruiters not to hire candidates who are “unsuited to the organisation”, or are “dismissive or derisory of diversity and inclusion and surrounding topics”.

Robin Aitken, the former BBC journalist and author has referred to these guidelines as showing “just how embedded Diversity, Equality and Inclusion ideology is in the BBC”.

The BBC says that this document had been replaced in January 2023 by a new framework – one that assesses each candidate against “BBC values and behaviours“. Which means, in effect, that nothing has changed when it comes to selecting each new wave of BBC apparatchiks.

BBC staff help convicted Somali sex offenders fight deportation

A specific example of the nature of a typical BBC employee was revealed in February 2024, when The Mail on Sunday reported on Mary Harper, Africa Editor for the BBC World Service. She was paid to give expert evidence on behalf of a convicted Somali gang rapist in his five-year legal battle fo remain in the UK.

Not only that, but she gave (or sold) similar evidence to help a number of other Somali sex offenders, drug dealers, and career criminals in their deportation appeals. In one case she testified that a Somali man who had committed a horrific sexual assault on a profoundly deaf 17-year old girl would be at “severely heightened risk” if he was sent back to Somalia because he had committed a sex crime.

There is more to this one example of highly placed and paid BBC staff being extreme left wing activists, but we shall move on.

Tim Davie facing both ways at once

Being “progressive” (i.e. left wing) is institutionalised at the BBC. From Tim Davie, the Director-General, downwards through the ranks, the stench of left wing ideology assaults the nostrils at every juncture.

In February 2024 Tim Davie told his staff that they should be “proud” to be progressive. But wait a minute. Isn’t this the same Tim Davie who identifies himself as one who is opposed to “the tyranny of a wholly polarised society”? The man who oversaw the hiring of outside “experts” to monitor the BBC’s output for bias?

Is it not true that there are people who identify as “progressive” and other people (almost certainly far more numerous) who identify as being decidedly not progressive?

So how can this man justify his position here? He is saying two different, conflicting, things. He can’t have it both ways. He either has to ensure he has political balance in the BBC’s output, so that left wing views and bias are eliminated, or he should stop trying to fool the rest of us through his ridiculous claims of impartiality.

Again, Robin Aitken sums it up perfectly. “For Tim Davie to say the BBC is proud to be progressive,” he says, “is to take a firm, and controversial, political position. It suggests he has a very poor understanding of what true impartiality looks like.” Mr Aitken also points out, correctly, that such a statement “directly contradicts the BBC’s core mission, which is to accurately reflect all shades of opinion, not merely those of progressives”.

BBC’s lofty ideals versus the reality

By “core mission”, Mr Aitken is referring to the BBC’s object, as set out in clause 4 of the “Incorporation and Objects” section of its Royal Charter (downloadable from https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a80c6d740f0b6230269570c/57964_CM_9365_Charter_Accessible.pdf). Here you will find just what the BBC’s object is supposed to be. It’s “the fulfilment of its Mission and the promotion of the Public Purposes.”

The BBC’s Mission is set out in clause 5 as “to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain.”

Clause 6 defines the Public Purposes of the BBC, the first of which is to “provide duly accurate and impartial news, current affairs and factual programming to build people’s understanding of all parts of the United Kingdom and of the wider world. Its content should be provided to the highest editorial standards. It should offer a range and depth of analysis and content not widely available from other United Kingdom news providers, using the highest calibre presenters and journalists, and championing freedom of expression, so that all audiences can engage fully with major local, regional, national, United Kingdom and global issues and participate in the democratic process, at all levels, as active and informed citizens.”

As everyone who has followed Anglo-Celtic’s battle to get justice from the BBC and, later, from Ofcom will know, the BBC ignores its obligations under the Royal Charter whenever it likes, just as it ignores complaints from viewers and listeners. It is high time for the whole putrid, “progressive” organisation to be given the fate that it is long overdue to receive – the order of abolition.

The BBC and its woke agenda

Back in October 2021 the then new Director General of the BBC, Tim Davie, wrote in the Daily Telegraph that he was all for “banishing fear from public debate”. He identified himself as one who “believes in the free and open exchange of ideas to push back against the tyranny of a wholly polarised society and make the UK a beacon for free, enlightened, robust and respectful debate”.

Around the same time it was announced, to a fanfare of media publicity, that outside “experts” had been hired to monitor the BBC’s output for bias. They were to review programmes of all types to “ensure impartiality guidelines are being met”.

Did this mean that a new age was about to dawn for the BBC and its viewers and listeners? An age where the BBC would return to being the honoured and respected institution established over many years by its first boss, John Reith? Would it really do what it was supposed to do – allow freedom of expression to all, rather than just the left?

"We don't really care if they complain." - Hugh Greene, Director-General BBC 1960-69.

A relentless output of biased content

We’ve seen from earlier posts in this series that the BBC has, since that time, lamentably failed to promote any kind of genuine “free and open exchange of ideas” that aren’t themselves thoroughly woke and left wing. See our posts about the re-writing of history and the Covid pandemic. It has also failed to stem the relentless output of biased and distorted news items, educational and entertainment programmes. But there’s more.

In particular, any debates over race and gender are heavily biased, with interviewees, panellists and even audiences carefully vetted beforehand to ensure that the opinions they express will be suitably left wing. The evidence for this can be only be circumstantial, but is plentiful all the same. The BBC website is typical of media sites in that it is designed to shock ordinary people into thinking that extreme left wing wokery is the norm. For example, at the present time it has at least one new article a week focusing on the slave trade.

It’s not that we in the British Nationalist camp dislike talking about the slave trade. It’s just that we like to have the whole subject covered fairly, to include the countless examples of non-whites enslaving whites, as well as the other way round. A mention of Britain’s role in the abolition of the slave trade would be a good way of promoting the “free, enlightened, robust and respectful debate” as well.

A one-sided woke agenda

It’s not just news and current events programmes that are woke. The seemingly now defunct “Campaign for Common Sense” published a report in 2023 which studied the output of the BBC in 2022 across 70 episodes of dramatic output, and involved watching over 60 hours of BBC programming. Its conclusion was that many of the programmes surveyed “had a distinct left-wing bias”, but that “there were no dramas reflecting a conservative, pro-Brexit or right-wing bent”.

In fairness, the BBC did, in 2021-22, initiate a new whistle-blowing scheme whereby members of staff are able to report instances of what they believe to be malpractice in the output of news and entertainment.

It seems the rate at which allegations of bias are upheld is on the rise. In 2021-22 just 16 per cent of cases were upheld, rising to 62.5 per cent for the period April to October 2023. One of them, for example, was where a news item gave us the impression that the President of Harvard University, in the US, had resigned because she was a “casualty of campus culture wars”, when in fact she was forced to leave over her response to “anti-semitism” on campus and when it was found that she had, er, plagiarised some of her academic work.

One woke organisation supervising another woke organisation

In early 2024, in a bid to improve “audience confidence” in the BBC (as opposed to elimating bias and returning to a path of honest and straightforward broadcasting), the then Conservative government announced major reforms involving the extension of Ofcom’s remit over the BBC to include its BBC News website.

The BBC’s social media guidelines will also come under such supervision from 2025. This follows a large number of complaints about the left-wing football pundit, Gary Lineker, and his posturings on Twitter/X. Ofcom will have the power to fine the BBC (and other broadcasters) if the rules are breached, and have, apparently, told the BBC to increase independent scrutiny of the way it handles complaints, so as to ensure fairness.

This fails to instill any confidence at all in us at Anglo-Celtic, who have suffered blatant unfairness in the way our complaints have been handled by both the BBC and, later, on appeal to Ofcom. The idea that Ofcom would rein in the woke output of the BBC and take any serious steps to ensure impartiality is laughable. Many of the managers and personnel at Ofcom are former BBC staff.

BBC’s lofty ideals versus the reality

The BBC is supposed to have a “core mission”, as set out in clause 4 of the “Incorporation and Objects” section of its Royal Charter (downloadable from https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a80c6d740f0b6230269570c/57964_CM_9365_Charter_Accessible.pdf). Here you will find just what the BBC’s object is supposed to be. It’s “the fulfilment of its Mission and the promotion of the Public Purposes.”

In our next post in this series, we’ll examine how the BBC enforces its woke agenda.

The BBC and the Covid Pandemic

We all know that the main debate over Covid 19 was whether the Government’s draconian lockdown measures were overkill, or whether they were justified in order to restrict the spread of a killer virus. So which side would the BBC endorse? The answer’s simple: The side that required restrictive measures to be imposed, that would do maximum economic damage to the country, and would cause the highest possible measure of public alarm, so procuring a largely misinformed, frightened and compliant population.

If the BBC were really impartial then it would have refrained from supporting either side, instead opting for as much full and open debate as possible. It would have given air time to expert scientists and doctors from both sides of the argument, in order to try to arrive at the truth.

Leading scientists cancelled

But truth and the BBC are uneasy companions, as we at Anglo-Celtic know only too well. The BBC management oversaw a totally one-sided discussion of the issue. They refused air time to several eminent scientists who, before Covid, had frequently been sought out for their opinions. One such was Professor Carl Heneghan, professor of evidence-based medicine at Oxford University. He was often interviewed on BBC radio and television in the early days of the pandemic. But as soon as he began questioning government policy he was blocked. He says, “For the whole of 2021 I was virtually ghosted by the BBC. I was sometimes booked to go on programmes but then it would be cancelled or I would be told I wasn’t needed”.

People with no medical qualifications but who supported the Government’s stance on Covid 19 and the lockdowns, however, were given plenty of air time. One example is Devi Sridhar, Professor of Public Health at the University of Edinburgh,counter-disinformation policy forum. It was she who, when the Pfizer vaccine was approved for use in children aged 12 to 15 in June 2021, told the children’s current affairs programme, Newsround, that the vaccine was “100 per cent safe for children”. Some journalists who were aware that no medical expert would ever claim that a vaccine is 100 per cent safe, raised the alarm with their managers. It turned out that Sridhar is not a virologist, immunologist, or expert on vaccination, and so is not qualified at all to pronounce on the safety or otherwise of any vaccine.

Toeing the line

It’s evident that during the Covid 19 lockdowns, the BBC reduced itself to being a mouthpiece for the Government. It even instructed its reporters not to use the word “lockdown”. Instead, they were to talk about curbs and restrictions. This was in line with Government policy.

Even worse, the BBC sent a representative to meetings of the “Counter-Disinformation Policy Forum”, set up by the Government to stifle dissent on the methods used to counter Covid 19. Jessica Cecil, founder of their “Trusted News Initiative” (set up in 2019, ostensibly to uncover “fake news” and warn media partners of such) was seconded to attend its meetings. No unredacted minutes of its meetings have ever been published.

The “Counter-Disinformation Policy Forum” (December 2020-June 2021) was chaired alternately by a Minister of State and a senior Civil Servant. It is not to be confused with the equally secretive “Counter Disinformation Unit”, also set up by the Government at about the same time. It’s clear that the attitude of these government bodies towards anyone who questioned the myths surrounding Covid and the lockdowns was hostile in the extreme. For example, they openly referred to their mission to “address the serious risk of harm posed by….anti-vaccination mis/disinformation”. Just look it up on any search engine.

The BBC partakes in a “conspiracy against public debate”

Robin Aitken, a former BBC journalist, has described it as “alarming” to discover that the BBC took part in this “forum”, and suggested it was a “conspiracy against public debate”. He went on to say that the BBC’s action shows that “when it chooses to, it toes the line and does the job the Government wants it to do.” And the job the Government wanted it to do was to argue the case that any information indicating that vaccines were anything other than totally safe and effective was untrue.

We’ve heard more and more lately about “disinformation” and “misinformation” from the mass media, led by the BBC. Robin Aitken sums this up perfectly by saying, “This whole idea of disinformation is a method of enforcing an orthodoxy on the public debate”. In other words, to stifle freedom of speech and expression (in defiance of its 2016 Charter).

The BBC implements a “climate of fear”

It’s just an excuse for blatant censorship. The BBC also implemented what current and former BBC journalists have called a “climate of fear”. Any journalist or manager who questioned this tyranny was “openly mocked”. And as for reporting on anti-lockdown marches then taking place in London, some of which attracted many thousands of protesters, they were “not on the agenda”. That’s “Cancel Culture” for you. Yet if any of this was put to senior management at the BBC, as it often was by a minority of more independent thinking journalists, they simply denied it. No explanation. No point-by-point refutation. Just denial. This sounds familiar to us at Anglo-Celtic. It’s what we had to contend with when we filed a 93-point series of complaints with the BBC and, later, with Ofcom, all backed up with documentary evidence. No attempt to answer even one of our complaints. Just denial.

"We don't really care if they complain." - Hugh Greene, Director-General BBC 1960-69.

Yet it gets more sinister. Anna Brees was a BBC news presenter who left the Corporation before the Covid pandemic. She was contacted by a like-minded BBC senior editor when she tweeted her opinions about the lockdowns. The editor emailed her with an assurance that he supported her in her concerns, and asked her to let him have the names of any other people in the BBC News department who shared “their” views. But if this was a genuine attempt to resist the tyranny at the BBC then it failed because of the fear that it may be a trap to identify dissenters, who would then be open to losing their jobs, and possibly their careers as well.

Ofcom as well

It wasn’t just the BBC. It was Ofcom as well. Ofcom, as well as the BBC, had a seat on the secretive “Counter Disinformation Policy Forum”, and on the day the first lockdown was announced by the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson it issued “guidance” (i.e. a diktat) on “broadcast standards during the coronavirus pandemic”. If this was designed to coerce any remaining independently minded journalists into toeing the line then it succeeded. The “climate of fear” was fully implemented. Proper national debate on the virus, the lockdowns, and public policy changes to accommodate them, was stifled.

The BBC failed totally in its duty to provide clear and independent coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic, the lockdowns, and the effect of all this on public health, the economy, and the nation as a whole.

It’s high time this corrupt, treacherous organisation was abolished. Find out more about our Campaign to Abolish the BBC by clicking here.